Mark Zuckerberg kept his silence – then did little to assuage the anger in a week that laid bare the worst of Silicon Valley
Every story has a beginning. For me, the story of Cambridge Analytica and Facebook that has unfolded so spectacularly this past week began in a cafe in Holloway, north London, at the beginning of 2017.
I was having a coffee with my colleague Carole Cadwalladr. She had recently written a series of articles that set out how certain Google search terms had been “hijacked...

Aleksandr Kogan, the Cambridge University academic whose app has set off the firestorm about online user data, says he’s considering suing Facebook.
LONDON — Aleksandr Kogan wants to set the record straight. “I am not a Russian spy,” he tells BuzzFeed News aboard a Saturday evening flight to the British capital. On Tuesday, the Cambridge University researcher is set to testify here in front of a parliamentary committee that is looking to determine whether the political consulting firm Cambri...

The abuse of Facebook’s platform for political purposes is a problem that doesn’t stop at the U.S border. Governments around the world are continuing to wrestle with the implications of Cambridge Analytica’s acquisition of Facebook user data from the heart of Europe to the capitals of Latin America’s most populous nations.
In South America, several chapters are still being written into the public record of Facebook’s privacy privations. Some Latin American democracies are also beginning to i...

Facebook and its data practices have been attacked by numerous government officials following revelations that Cambridge Analytica clandestinely gained access to the information of 50 million users.
Cambridge Analyica, which has now been suspended from Facebook, stands accused of fraudulently obtaining Facebook user data and then using it to run election ads on US president Donald Trump’s behalf.
Facebook's vice president and deputy general counsel, Paul Grewal, admitted in a post yesterday...

In 2004, when Mark Zuckerberg was a Harvard undergrad working on a skunkworks project called The , a friend asked him how he’d managed to obtain more than 4,000 emails, photos and other bits of personal info from fellow students.
“People just submitted it. I don’t know why. They ‘trust me,’” Zuckerberg wrote in an instant-messaging exchange leaked to website Silicon Alley Insider. The guy who would become CEO of one of the world’s biggest tech giants added, “Dumb f—s.”
Zuckerberg later expr...

In a video published online in September, a social scientist named Alex Spectre made an earnest pitch for his new startup. Clad in the Silicon Valley uniform of open-collar shirt and blazer, Spectre boasted that his company -- Philometrics -- would revolutionize the way online surveys were done, making it easier for companies to design questionnaires that people would actually respond to on Facebook, Twitter or other sites. Crucially, he said, the surveys could predict the responses for large...

0 Australian leader backs Zuckerberg's grilling in Parliament
- Australia's prime minister said on Thursday he would welcome Facebook founder and chief executive Mark Zuckerberg testifying to an Australian parliamentary committee on the social media giant's sharing of data with Chinese phone maker Huawei.
Leaders of Australia's Parliamentary Joint Committee on Intelligence and Security have raised the prospect of the 34-year-old multi-billionaire being invited to explain Facebook's relation...

Russian trolls are influencing how Facebook lets advertisers target its users.
Facebook is now stipulating that targeted political ads on its platform undergo human review, which could slow down how quickly marketers can get their Facebook ads up and running. While the change in ad reviews will have the biggest impact on political advertisers, it is notable because it shows the pressure Facebook is facing for letting a Russian troll farm buy ads on its platform is leading the social giant to...